final examination topics: MA, English: British history II: The History of the British Isles from the Industrial Revolution to the Present Day

topics

The Wars with France. Castlereagh and the Congress of Vienna. Peterloo and the Six Acts. Liberal (New) Toryism: Reforms in the economy, the justice system and new trends in foreign policy. Catholic emancipation.
Chartism and the Anti Corn Law League. Victorian Party politics. The emergence of the of the Liberal and Conservative parties, their leaders and their policies: economic, social and foreign. Portraits of Disraeli and Gladstone.
A Century of Reform Bills. 1832, 1867, 1872, 1884-85, 1911, 1949. Elaborate on the process of the extension of the franchise and the redistribution parliamentary seats in Britain.
Britain and Europe: Victorian foreign policy under Palmerston, Disraeli, Gladstone, and Lansdowne. British attitudes to France, Germany, Russia, Ottoman Turkey and Austria-Hungary. General doctrines, particular problems. The Eastern Question.
Britain and the World. The expansion and administration of the British Empire, 1815-1931. India: the East India Company, the Sepoy Mutiny (1857), direct rule, and “The Great Game”. The “Scramble for Africa”. White dominions vs. Coloured colonies. The post-First World War mandates. Economic decline and political tensions from the late 19th century. Rapid retreat: decolonisation after the Second World War.
The struggle for Irish autonomy and independence. The Home Rule Bills. Radicalisation: Fenians, the IRB, Sinn Fein and the Easter Rising. Partition. Ireland and Great Britain during the two world wars. The origins of the Troubles.
Liberal landslide in 1906. David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill and the “People’s Budget” of 1909. The question of tariffs and armaments. The “Strange Death of Liberalism”, 1910-1914: the workers, women and Ireland. Britain and the origins of the First World War. Britain’s changing position in the world, 1890s to 1914, especially with regard to Germany, France, Russia and the Ottoman Empire. The Boer War. The Eastern Question comes to a head. Accommodation with Japan. The foreign policy of Sir Edward Grey.
Great Britain and the First World War. The desperate reckoning: August 1914-December 1916. Lloyd George and his new dispensation: War Cabinet, War Economy. Britain and the Peace treaties, 1919-1923. The new British Mandates in the Middle East.
Great Britain during the interwar years. The end of the wartime coalition, deep economic crisis. The question of the Gold Standard. The first Labour government. European security: Britain and the Treaty of Locarno. The General Strike of 1926. The National Government. Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain and the question of the appeasement of dictators on the Continent.
Britain and the Second World War. The Phoney War, Norway, Dunkirk. The Fall of France, Churchill becomes Prime Minister. Changes in administration; the home policies of the new government; the role of Clement Attlee and the Trade Union leaders. 1940; the Battle of Britain: Britain’s “Finest Hour”. Retreat from Greece. In the “Grand Alliance”. Campaigns in Africa, D-Day and Europe. The great wartime conferences. Britain’s diminishing role in the Alliance. The “Home Front” and social transformation. The significance of the Beveridge Report.
The Attlee government and the nationalisation of key industries and the Bank of England. Aneurin Bevan and the National Health Service. Democratisation of the education system. Financial collapse. Retreat from Empire: India, Palestine, the Persian Gulf, Africa, Malaya. Relations with the United States, the Commonwealth and Europe. Churchill and Eden. The fiasco at Suez in 1956.
From political consensus to confrontation. Macmillan, Wilson, Heath, Callaghan and Thatcher. What does the term “Butskellism” refer to? Describe Britain’s faltering process of accession to the European Economic Community, and the subsequent difficulties of membership. Margaret Thatcher and Neo-Conservatism.

select reading list

Blythe, Ronald. The Age of Illusion: England in the Twenties and Thirties 1919-1940, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963.
Campbell, John. Edward Heath, a biography, London: Jonathan Cape, 1993.
Churchill, Winston S. A History of the English-speaking Peoples, 4 vols, London: Cassell and Company, 1956. (Vol. 3 from [incl.] chapter XVIII, and vol. 4)
Cook, Chris and Stevenson, John. The Longman Handbook of Modern British History, 1714-1995, (3rd edition), London: Longman, 1996.
Curtis, Edmund. A History of Ireland, London: Methuen, 1936 (And later editions) (Relevant parts)
Dangerfield, George. The Strange Death of Liberal England 1910-1914, London, 1935 (and later editions).
Davies, Norman. The Isles, A History, London: Macmillan, 1999. (Relevant parts)
Feiling, Keith. A History of England. From the Coming of the English to 1918, London, Macmillan, 1950. (pp. 740-1120)
Frank, Tibor and Magyarics, Tamás. Handouts for British History, Budapest: Nemzeti Tankönyvkiadó, 1994. (Relevant parts)
Hobsbawm, E.J. Industry and Empire, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968. (Pp. 109-321 of the 1969 Penguin edition.)
Kee, Robert. The Green Flag, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972.
Keir, Sir David Lindsay. The Constitutional History of Modern Britain, 1485-1951, (Fifth edition), London: Adam and Charles Black, 1955.
Lee, Christopher. This Sceptred Isle, vol. 1, 55 BC-1901. From the Roman Invasion to the Death of Queen Victoria, London: BBC Books, 1997. (pp. 470-631)
Lee, Christopher. This Sceptred Isle, vol. 2, The Twentieth Century, London: BBC Books, 2000.
McCord, Norman. British History 1815-1906, (Series title: The Short History of the Modern World, General Editor: J.M. Roberts), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Madgwick, P.J., Steeds, D. and Williams, L.J. Britain Since 1945, London: Hutchinson, 1982.
Maitland, F.W. The Constitutional History of England, Edited by H.A.L. Fisher, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908. (And later editions) (Relevant parts)
Morgan, Kenneth O, ed. The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. (Relevant parts)
Mowat, Charles Loch. Britain Between the Wars, 1918-1940, London: Methuen, 1955.
Palmer, Alan and Veronica. The Chronology of British History, London: Century, 1992.
Pelling, Henry. Modern Britain, 1885-1955, London: Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd, 1960.
Plumb, J.H. et al eds. The English Heritage, St. Louis, Missouri: Forum Press, 1978. (Relevant parts)
Reynolds, David. Britannia Overruled. British Policy & World Power in the 20th Century, London: Longman, 1991.
Roberts, C and D. A History of England, 3rd edition, vol. 2: 1688 to the Present, Englewood Cliffs, New York: Prentice-Hall, 1998. (Relevant parts)
Robson, W. 20th Century Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973.
Sanders, David. Losing and Empire, Finding a Role. British Foreign Policy Since 1945, London: Macmillan, 1990.
Sissons, Michael and French, Philip, eds. Age of Austerity, 1945-1951, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1963.
Sked, Alan and Cook, Chris. Post-war Britain: a political history, 3rd edition, London: Penguin Books, 1990.
Smith, Leslie. Harold Wilson. The Authentic Portrait, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964.
Taylor, A.J.P. English History 1914-1945, Oxford University Press, 1965.
Thatcher, Margaret. The Downing Street Years, London: HarperCollins, 1993.
Thatcher, Margaret. The Path to Power, London: HarperCollins, 1995.
Williams, E.N. A Documentary History of England, Vol. 2, (1559-1931) Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965. (Relevant parts)
Williams, Glyn and Ramsden, John. Ruling Britannia. A Political History of Britain, 1688-1988, London: Longman, 1990. (Relevant parts)